The Secret Societies of Insects

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The Secret Societies of Insects

Ants, bees, wasps – no more than "the famous socialites with the good PR, the celebrities of the insect social world," writes Gaden Robinson in his review of James Costa's The Other Insect Societies.

It's these insects that are recognizably social, having developed reproductive castes and complex cooperative colonies. But outside the so-called eusocial insects, insect sociality has been an ambiguous, contentious field of study. Where one entomologist sees chitinous civilization, another sees bug barbarians.

Costa divides insect sociality into four species categories – once-in-a-lifetime breeders, paternal carers, fortress defenders and herds – in which cooperation without consideration of family loyalty has proved best for bug survival, contrary to kin selection, where animals favor their relatives. Writes Costa,

The widespread occurrence of communal oviposition, merging of unrelated groups, and the absence of kin discrimination in many groups suggests that maintenance of strict family structure is unimportant relative to the group-derived benefits....

Descriptive and interpretive natural history, ecology and taxonomy is a wonderfully rich field of science and involves working from a vast literature spanning a timeline much longer than those of many other biological disciplines and written in many more languages. Thus, with the earwigs (Dermaptera), Costa is able to start with the master of eighteenth-century biological observation, the Frenchman Charles deGeer, writing in 1773 of finding: “a female earwig with several small insects, which were quite obviously her progeny. They did not leave her, and even placed themselves under her body as chickens under a hen.So insects of this kind take care, in a way, of their offspring”.Subsequent work has shown that, of the earwig species whose life histories are known, maternal care is practically universal, the female building a nest, grooming the eggs, feeding the young and protecting them.

(Almost makes me feel bad for all those earwigs I roasted with Fourth of July sparklers as a kid. Almost.)

Insect sociality, Costa concludes, isn't restricted to the species we normally consider social, but takes many forms. It'll be interesting to see what patterns emerge in these other, underattended bugs that may provide insight into human interactions.